Gun-toting gold miners resist Brazil’s attempt to take back the Amazon

Attempts by the Brazilian state to reassert control over its lawless Amazon territories are leading to a deadly shooting war in the nation’s north.

The South American republic, led by left-leaning President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is attempting to rein in a gold-mining boom on the border of the indigenous Yanomami reserves.

That illicit industry — and illegal logging and land grabs in general — surged under nearly a decade of conservative rule, during which the country’s leaders turned a blind eye to the armed conquest of large swaths of forest by small-scale miners and large-scale agriculture.

The illegal incursions on the Amazon have resulted in mass deforestation, along with the pollution of rivers and the spread of epidemic disease. Some Brazilian human rights activists are also arguing that the miners moving in increasing numbers into Brazil’s constitutionally protected indigenous territory — like that of the Yanomami — may have been guilty of genocide, The Washington Post reported.

Now, under Lula’s administration, Brazil is trying to rehabilitate its dire environmental record and reassert control. 

Lula pledged at the 2022 United Nations climate change conference to end illegal deforestation by 2030. 

In January, he took a flashy step toward that goal when he announced a state of emergency and ordered Federal police — under the highway and environmental ministries — to take the forest back.

But events last weekend reinforced how hard shutting down the illicit mining industry — or the broader plague of deforestation — is likely to be.

Last Saturday, miners ambushed environmental ministry officials as they attempted to dismantle an illegal mining camp near Yanomami territory, according to the government.

The heavily armed miners — who were suspected of shooting three Yanomami — opened fire as the environment ministry special forces attempted to land their helicopter. 

“Police returned fire and hit the four shooters, who succumbed to their injuries,” according to the government statement. 

The shootout represented an escalation in Brazil’s months-long attempt to expel the estimated 20,000 miners for the Yanomami reserve — which constitute nearly as many invaders as its 28,000 Yanomami residents.

In three months of work, in Yanomami territory alone, the Brazilian government has destroyed 327 mining camps, 18 planes and two helicopters. They also demolished hundreds of motors and dozens of rafts, which are used to suck mud from the river bottom and filter it for flecks of gold.

In doing so, they are potentially taking on one of South America’s biggest mafias — the First Capital Command (PCC), a Sao Paulo-based prison gang suspected to have a strong presence in the forest mines, The Guardian reported. 

Forest-clearing “has advanced radically, violently and has changed its style in recent years,” Tereza Campello, the head of Brazil’s Amazon Fund development program, told Bloomberg.

“Today, it is a coordinated action with organized crime and narcotrafficking.”

That pattern of deforestation is pushing the Amazon toward a tipping point at which it will begin to collapse, the World Bank concluded in a report this week.

That could potentially be very expensive for Brazil. Passing the tipping point could cost Brazil alone $184 billion by 2050, the World Bank warned.

Existing indigenous reserves like that of the Yanomami are also giving the rest of Brazil a reprieve. Those patches of intact forest filter contaminants and particulate matter out of the plumes of toxic smoke released from human-caused forest fires, leading to potential reductions of 15 million cases of cardiovascular and respiratory disease and $2 billion in treatment costs, according to a paper published in Nature Communications in April. The destruction of the areas would amplify the already-surging health impacts of Amazonian deforestation.

Companies and nonprofit organizations have taken steps to crack down on the purchase of products cultivated on land cut out of the forest.

This week, environmental law firm ClientEarth sued agribusiness giant Cargill over its failure to prevent deforestation in the Amazon and other protected Brazilian biomes.

The company’s shoddy “due diligence raises the risk that the meat sold in supermarkets across the world is raised on so-called ‘dirty’ soy,’” ClientEarth alleged. Dirty soy in this case refers to soy grown on fields illegally cleared from the Amazon. 

While Cargill has announced plans for its supply chains to no longer contribute to deforestation of the Amazon by 2025, the company buys 42 percent of its stock from third-party traders, with limited oversight into how their products are grown, according to The Guardian.

A 2020 investigation by The Guardian found proof that companies around the world — like British supermarket giant Tesco and McDonald’s — were raising chicken on Cargill-supplied feed grown in deforested Amazon plots.

Cargill is not the only major company allegedly sourcing products grown on illegally cleared lands.

Multinational meat company JBS has been repeatedly caught selling meat grown in deforested fields in the Amazon, according to a report by environmental nonprofit Mighty Earth.

And a December probe by Brazilian federal prosecutors found that nearly 17 percent of cattle bought by JBS in one Amazon state “came from ranches with ‘irregularities’ such as illegal deforestation,” Reuters reported.

The risks that come with a company’s products being associated with destruction of the forest — like regulatory action, boycotts or simple reputational damage — are increasingly concerning to the financiers that large multinationals rely on for funding. 

This week, leading London-based bank Barclays announced far stricter controls targeting Brazilian meat companies like JBS, for which the bank is the biggest financier.

Barclays bank managers said they had “no appetite” for financing any industry linked to illegal logging, violence against indigenous communities, or using fire in forestry.

But corporate-facing strategies like Barclays’s have a major downside, Mighty Earth argued.

The bank’s new policy “is reliant on its clients to police their own activities – and it does not explicitly cover livestock companies using deforestation-linked animal feed.”

Lula, meanwhile, plans to reverse the tide of deforestation in the Amazon by increasing enforcement on illegal mining and logging in the country’s frontiers by federal environmental officials — whose responsibilities former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro had slashed, according to EuroNews.

Lula wants Brazil to become a “green superpower,” with an agricultural economy that draws on the power of the country’s extraordinary biodiversity — without ruining it.

That will be a costly proposition, at least up front. “The action in the Amazon is complex, requires articulated policies throughout the territory and is very expensive,” Campello of Amazon Fund told Bloomberg.

According to the World Bank, Brazil needs almost 4 percent of its annual GDP to meet its goals for sustainable infrastructure alone.

Concerned over the rates of deforestation under Bolsonaro, in 2019 Germany and Norway froze their contributions to the Amazon Fund, a largely foreign-funded part of the country’s national development bank. 

With Lula in power, the Fund is back. In April, President Biden announced $500 million for the Fund, pending congressional approval, according to CNBC.

And Brazil is also trying to raise money for the fund from the European Union, Japan and the U.K., according to Bloomberg.

One immediate project the country is undertaking: getting food and medicine to Yanomami communities to help make up for rising rates of disease and malnutrition, as miners have chased away game, ruined the forest and brought epidemics.

Another will be pouring more resources into the satellites that have helped Brazil’s police patrol the forests — while also helping miners evade them.

Remote satellites and sensing tools have allowed the Brazilian federal government — and embattled indigenous communities — to track and report illegal deforestation, indigenous activist Txai Suruí told the Tico Times. 

“But technology can be used for evil,” she warned. 

Starlink satellite internet units, off-grid connections produced by Elon Musk, have proven a favorite means of backcountry connectivity for mining gangs, according to the AP.

“The same satellite we use to protect our territory is used by invaders to destroy,” Suruí said, noting that plots of stolen indigenous land were being sold openly on Facebook.